First Day of Christmas

I plan ahead for a Halloween without my man.

Tim and I love Christmas. We're not scare to admit it. We LOVE it.

So, we have a few special days in the Fall that gear us up for the big birthday. (Jesus', of course.)

First, we have Halloween. I grew up hating Halloween because my mother hates it. We had only one very small box of ghost and goblin decorations, and most of them involved fashioning baby ghosts out of toilet paper or something like unto it. We never got trick-or-treaters because we lived in a neighborhood full of old people. And trick-or-treating was also not so fun because, again, we lived in a neighborhood full of old people ... that was also on a hill. And despite what most people believe, it does get cold in California, and for some reason Halloween was always one of those nights. A windy night can turn a beautiful, rented Princess dress into just a slip under a florescent pink coat very quickly.

But after we got married and moved into our house, it all changed. Halloween became about neighbors coming by and winter coming to stay. We set up some family traditions and decided as a couple that the best part about Halloween is that it is the first day of Christmas. After Halloween the cold comes and the season begins. Soon you get to Thanksgiving which is, of course, our second special day of the Christmas season. We start a count down to Christmas on Thanksgiving and put up our tree and host our first party that very weekend. So in our home we celebrate wintertime and family-time from Oct. 31 until the end of December, and we love it.

So on top of all our traditional emotions for the holiday, this is a big Halloween for us this year because Quinn is old enough to walk around the neighborhood begging for candy that I will, of course, throw away for her. But Tim is going to be on tour for a month before and a month after the First Day of Christmas this year. So, tonight we did what any normal Christmas loving family would do. We planned our Halloween so that he would not feel left out of the fun on the big day.

As our Family Home Evening activity, we looked through a costume catalog for ideas for Quinn. Then we went through her closest and pulled out her Poodle costume from last year and the Kimono Tim brought back from Japan last June. We tried both on her. She hated the poodle. She loved the Kimono. So, there you have it. Our Little Kristie Quinn is going to be a Little Asian Girl for her second Halloween. We are going to put her hair in a ponytail with chop sticks, and she will answer the door for Trick-or-Treaters and pass out fortune cookies and Asian cider.

My parents are coming into town for that weekend, so I will not be lonely. But I am sure I will have to do some convincing to get them on board for the the whole "First Day of Christmas" emotion of the evening. Tim will be on video Skype on the computer for half of the night so he will be able to see Quinn and watch her hand out the cookies.

So now because of a little forethought, the First Day of Christmas 2008 will survive. I better get used to this planning ahead and these kind of "including daddy" activities because I don't think the tours are getting any shorter.

Happy Halloween. Merry Christmas.